Saturn article in USA Today

Its really sad. My wife's 1996 SL1 was dying. Previous owner abused the car. Looked at the Ion first but couldn't buy it. Whoever designed that car should be shot. Bought a 2003 Honda Civic EX instead. Made in Canada or Ohio with 65% American parts. I still have my 1995 SL going strong though at 110,000 miles.

My parents have two Saturns, my grandparents have two Saturns and my sister and brother-in-law have two Saturns. Since GM took control, none them like where Saturn is heading and will probably by foreign instead. My dad always called Saturn "The last American hope." It really is sad :(

I Just saw on TechTV that CHevy is redesigning the Cavalier and also coming out with a newer mod-styled design compact car. Looks like GM is investing it's efforts elsewhere than Saturn.

marx404

The 05 Cavalier is built on the same platform as the ION - it will be renamed COBALT. GM will utilize Saturn in one form or another is my best, unprofessional guess. It's not going anywhere soon.

Blame the EPA for it. They're the ones trying to get rid of letting the driver actually chose what gear a car's in. Automatics today have lockup, get darn near the same mileage, and can be tied to the computer for emissions stuff.

That, and most drivers are too stupid to learn stick shift. Heck, I took my road test on a '93 saturn with stick. I think just doing that got me past... (ending up on the curb when parking wasn't helping, I STILL can't park the saturn for shit. The wagon was easy, the van's easy, go figure)

Speaking of automatics, my dad's Honda minivan is nice, except the $#^$%^ transmission can't decide on a gear. It upshifts and downshifts often. Take away the top two gears, it makes up it's mind. I've driven other Japanese cars with this 'feature', and a few other bad habits, which makes me wonder if they know how to build an automatic. So much for superior Japanese design :/

The EPA, in its yearly Fuel Economy Trends documents, lists the manual transmission as one of a number of technologies that improves fuel economy. However, it is easier to control emissions with an automatic transmission (which is why some of the vehicles that meet the lowest emission regulation levels only come with automatic transmissions).

Periodic statements like this fascinate me. Since Saturn didn't exist before GM chose to invest 3+ billion dollars creating it and since Saturn has never not been "under GM's control", I wonder what it means.

Alan King

No Saturn has been quite different. In the plant where I came from management made all the decisions and all engineering changes came from Detroit. Also all marketing for GM comes from one big department.

Saturn in the beginning had their own marketing department, their own engineers to design the car, had UAW members working alongside the engineers to design the car and build process, and had UAW members making decisions with management on how the business runs.

Now our marketing is lumped in with GM, the engineers are GM standard engineers who sit in Detroit and only design one part of a car that is put in to many cars and never come down to the plant level to try to fix build or quality problems with their parts, and managers make most all the decisions or await decisions to be handed down to them from Detroit. Not to mention we had to abandon build processes that we proved were safer and saved money by decreasing in-plant repairs. Why?...Because we had to go back to GM common builds & platforms, and had to abandon the build process innovated at Spring Hill.

So is there a difference in GM control from the past to the present....Very much so...

Jim

Yeah, Saturn's working with the UAW *really* helped. I spent 25 min again last night trying to put on the fan belt because some clown decided that the side of the engine needs no clearance. And don't get me started on the pain in the ass the water pump is to replace, or plenty of other wonderful design features....

There's something elegant about functional simplicity of which seems to elude automakers.

The no clearance issues give me this visual of a meeting with marketing and engineering where marketing is telling engineering to put everything really close together because obviously only high quality import makers can build to such tolerances and the buying pubic would perceive a Saturn with these same tolerances as comparable - but I digress...

Of course I was hoping they would have turned the engine in the right direction (front to back of course), put the transaxle in the tail, and gave me another 100 ponies before putting the S series out to pasture. Yeah, right... (good meds, eh?) ...smile

No kidding. It's not just GM - witness iDrive.

I think a lot of it is the "Well, it'll never be changed" attitude too. Explains having the drop the engine to change the rack on my old Celebrity. Well, the rack NEVER goes bad, right? Especially on an 80's GM car, right? If they had shifted the engine on the Saturn to the right (standing looking at it from the front) by only 2 inches, the car would be a boatload easier to work on. Tools and HANDS would be able to get in there easier...

The Japanese build things small because Japanese hands are small...

Chrysler's putting their money in RWD,too bad their current transmissions all suck hard. I still love how Pontiac, GM's 'excitment division', can't seem to build a decent car with a V8 in it. Heck, the new GTO is Australian in origin. I blame lack of cheap high performance cars on the Nader crowd, though. At least the V6 is starting to become the norm as opposed to the god awful inline 4s everything had until the late 90's...

The major difference between Saturn and other GM divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile, & Cadillac) is the older divisions existed prior to GM. They were purchased and put together to create GM where GM created Saturn.

So did the other five divisions.

who were GM engineers.

which is a good thing and is being used in other plants as many years of fear and distrust between management and the union are slowly being overcome.

Two things, 1) GM hasn't had an engineering department located in Detroit since

1993 and 2) If you haven't been able to figure out that GM isn't going to be able to compete with Toyota, Honda, et al by engineering unique parts for every car, then I am sorry for you.

As a GM engineer who frequently goes to plants to understand and correct problems, I know this is just an ignorant rabble rousing rant. I have a co-worker who is going through a start-up of a new product in a plant in a distant state and he has spent so much time on airplanes that when we see luggage in his cubicle we have to ask "dirty or clean?" to see if he is coming or going.

Actually, times have changed for all of us and they will continue to change.

Alan King

...had to do a search on iDrive as I was unfamiliar - found a rant on cheersandgears and was surprised BMW would take that approach. Technology is cool (to me) when it's initially invisible and user intuitiveness is scaleable. I heard a story recently where a new Toyota Prius was coming out of a automated carwash and the guys who normally drive the car to a drying station could not determine how to start the car and had to push it.

But the reason that GM forced the common platforms is because there was no way to have a positive ROI because development and tooling costs are so high. You can't make a profit (a real profit, not an operating profit) on a platform that sells only 200K units per year. The only way Saturn could increase volume significantly is to sell in other regions, but they tried this, and it failed miserably (Japan and Taiwan).

GM is a business. They can't keep pouring money into a bottomless pit, with no hope of ever getting a return on it.

Maybe so, but their return on this change is that it is less likely that I'll be buying any GM.